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Yevgeny Khaldei, 80, War Photographer, Dies

Yevgeny Khaldei, the photographer whose pictures of Soviet soldiers hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag in Berlin are among the best known images of World War II, died on Monday night in Moscow. He was 80.

The cause of death was not given in Russian press reports.

Mr. Khaldei is best known for his World War II photographs, which he took while also carrying a gun and engaging in combat. One of the most famous is his photo of Soviet soldiers hoisting their flag over the Reichstag as Berlin fell in 1945. A soldier raises the billowing flag over the seat of the Nazi Government and the smoldering capital, while stone figures of Germany's past glories look from the roof.

That was only one of many piercing images he captured during the nearly four years that Russia fought Germany. He photographed Soviet women who were pilots and snipers; Jews suddenly freed from the ghettoes; people carting meager possessions out of bombed homes, and Nazi officials who killed their families and committed suicide rather than fall into Soviet hands.

''The human drama of combat is conveyed in his stark portrayals,'' said Susan T. Goodman, chief curator of the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, which staged a major exhibition of his work last April. ''Rather than documenting the heroics of combat in the war-ravaged cities of Russia and Europe, Khaldei focused extensively on the devastated lives and landscapes he encountered.''

This sensibility was dramatically apparent in words of the photographer quoted in this exhibition. He recalled speaking to a blind man and his guide amid the rubble of Berlin: ''Where are you coming from?'' he asked. ''They did not know. Where are you going? That, too, they did not know. They had arrived at the end of the world.''

Mr. Khaldei photographed every Russian leader since Stalin. His pictures of the Allied summit meetings at Yalta and Potsdam, as well as the Nuremberg trials, were distributed worldwide.

In a 1995 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Khaldei said: ''I have just always wanted people to know what really happened in their time. I would have to say that many times my heart was broken. But I also witnessed greatness.''

His Reichstag picture, almost operatic in its effect, was reproduced on magazines around the world, and became a staple of Soviet postage stamps and commemorative postcards. Its inspiration was the picture of the Iwo Jima flag-raising. After conceiving the idea, he tried in vain to find a Soviet flag in Berlin, then flew back to Moscow, where an uncle who was a tailor crafted one from a tablecloth.

He enhanced the picture in the darkroom by adding clouds and smoke to increase the dramatic effect. He also removed a wristwatch from a Soviet soldier who was wearing two at the request of superiors who worried that this made the soldier look like a thief.

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Miles Barth, curator of archives and collections at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, argued that the merits of the photograph were not diminished because it was staged. ''A number of very important photographs in history were completely set up,'' he said.

Mr. Khaldei was born into an Orthodox Jewish household just as the revolution began, on March 10, 1917. A year after his birth, a pogrom swept through Ukraine. A bullet hit his mother as she held him in her arms, killing her instantly. In 1941, his father and sisters were killed by invading Nazis. Press reports this week carried no mention of the photographer's survivors.

His work life began at the age of 11, when he got a job washing steam engines. His fascination with photography was inspired by a picture in a magazine. He made his first camera out of a cardboard box and his dead grandmother's spectacles.

In 1936, Mr. Khaldei, then 19, persuaded Tass, the Soviet press agency, to hire him. His prewar pictures included a shot of the opening of the Moscow subway, which ran on the front page of Pravda.

Anti-Semitism was a constant in his life. In 1948 he was dismissed from Tass for being Jewish. In 1972 Pravda dismissed him for the same reason. He clearly had reason to be prudent, and he was. Mr. Barth of the photography center, who just a few months ago met with Mr. Khaldei to discuss buying some of his pictures, said his postwar work tended to feature shots of heroic collective farm and factory workers.

''It was completely undistinguished,'' he said. ''He was part of the machinery to disseminate controlled information.''

None of his work during the Soviet years made him much money, nor was he given personal credit when photos were published. But in recent years, Mr. Barth said, historians have shown a new interest in Soviet photographers.

Anthony Suau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American photographer whose pictures of the war in Chechnya were combined in a book with Mr. Khaldei's work from World War II, said, ''If you want to understand Russia, you can look at his pictures.''